LinkedIn advertising strategy

LinkedIn Advertising Strategy

What do you want to achieve with LinkedIn advertising? Do your campaigns serve a specific product, aim to increase brand awareness, provide new leads for your sales team, or share information with your target audience? All of this is possible with LinkedIn Advertising. With this article, we will guide you through the following steps:

• LinkedIn advertising campaign: phases and objectives
• LinkedIn advertising budget
• Campaign resources

Clearly define the goal and target audience of your campaign in advance. Afterward, you can easily determine how many phases your campaign consists of, which campaign objectives will help you achieve this, how much budget you need, and which campaign resources you will use.

LinkedIn Advertising Strategy: Phases and Objectives

Now that you know what you want to achieve, the question is: how are you going to achieve it? LinkedIn offers various campaign objectives, each with a central focus:

1. Brand Awareness – Ad impressions
2. Website Visits – Website visits
3. Engagement – Interaction with ads
4. Video Views – Video views, at least 2 seconds
5. Lead Generation – Number of leads
6. Talent Leads – Job applications (Recruiter accounts only)
7. Website Conversions – Achieved goals
8. Applicants – Job applications

The difference between lead generation and website conversions is that lead generation uses a lead form on LinkedIn. If your primary goal is to generate leads, this approach adds an extra step to the process, with the idea of collecting more leads. However, it also means you’re not directing people to your landing page, potentially missing out on part of the user experience. If you have a well-converting landing page that provides value to your potential leads, website conversions can also be a suitable goal for collecting leads.

LinkedIn Advertising Strategy: Don’t Forget Your Customer Journey!

What does your target audience’s customer journey look like? And at which stage does your LinkedIn campaign fit in? For example, if you want to distribute a series of recorded videos to increase brand awareness, you’re likely at the beginning of the customer journey. However, if you want to collect leads, you’re much further along in that journey. We believe that good LinkedIn campaigns should align with the customer journey. Therefore, we often work with multiple campaign phases and different campaign objectives. The number of campaign phases and the objectives you use will depend on your goals and target audience.

A commonly used objective for our clients is to have users download a whitepaper in exchange for their contact information, which is a lead generation campaign. In this case, the target audience is often relatively unfamiliar with the brand and its products or services at the beginning of the campaign. From experience, we have found that the following LinkedIn advertising strategy yields the best results:

1. Brand Awareness
2. Website Traffic
3. Lead Generation

Sometimes, this strategy is complemented with a campaign focused on video views. This approach involves showing the audience an advertisement for brand awareness and potentially a video view campaign several times at a relatively low cost. Following this, the goal is to share knowledge or a compelling customer case through a website traffic campaign. By initially running brand awareness and website traffic campaigns, we increase the number of leads generated in the lead generation campaign. There is already a certain level of recognition of the brand and its offerings.

Budget for LinkedIn

You can determine your budget in two ways:

1. How much do you think is needed to reach your entire target audience?
2. How much can acquiring new (potential) leads cost?

If you base your budget on the size of your target audience, you can estimate how much budget you need to display your campaign to (almost) your entire target audience based on the average CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). For example, our benchmark has shown that the average CPM for a brand awareness campaign is €15.01, while it’s €26.21 for a website traffic campaign. However, keep in mind that a thousand impressions do not equate to reaching a thousand unique members. So, it’s wise to budget slightly more if you want to reach your entire target audience. We suggest considering around +25%.

If you determine your budget from an internal perspective, you assess how much it should cost to acquire new leads. If you don’t yet have insight into how much a new lead can cost, gather the following information:

1. How much does a new customer generate on average in the first year?
2. How much does a new customer generate on average over the entire period they remain a customer?
3. How many leads do you need on average to acquire one new customer?

Based on this information, you can determine the value of a new lead, both in the short and long term, and how much a new lead can cost.

Campaign Resources

Now that you know your budget and which campaign phases you’ll use to achieve your goal, you can choose and potentially produce your campaign resources. On LinkedIn, you can use the following advertising formats:

1. Images (single and carousel)
2. Video
3. Text
4. Document
5. Event

Additionally, you also have the option to advertise with sponsored InMails and chat messages. Keep in mind that not every advertising format is suitable for every campaign objective.

If you want to learn more about using LinkedIn for your business, we’d be happy to discuss the organic and paid opportunities of LinkedIn with you! Want to read more? We’ve gathered all the information on our LinkedIn advertising page.